This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Oscar Jimenez-Castellanos is an associate professor in
Education Policy and Evaluation in Mary Lou Fulton Teachers and Morrison
Institute Faculty Fellow at Arizona State University. His primary area
of research is school finance equity and adequacy in particular as it
relates to traditionally marginalized communities. He has published in
leading academic journals such as Review of Educational Research,
Journal of Education Finance, The Urban Review and Journal of Latinos
and Education. He is currently working as a school finance expert
witness in the Martinez case and organizing an AERA 2016 presidential
session entitled, Public Scholarship to Inform Public School Finance In a
Culturally Pluralistic Democracy: A Town Hall Meeting.
Did you hear the news? The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is going
to be reauthorized! Or is it? In July of 2015, the Senate and House both
passed separate bills to reauthorize the du jour version of the
original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. A Senate
version, the “Every Child Achieves Act” (ECAA), is believed to be the
most plausible to pass into law given President Obama’s eagerness to
veto the House version coined the “Student Success Act” (SSA).
Currently, leaders in the two chambers are conferencing to work through some of these bills’ key differences in an attempt to create legislation that will pass Congress. This would be the first ESEA reauthorization since 2002. Both
Republicans and Democrats agree that NCLB needs revision but for vastly
different reasons. Most recent newspaper reports and commentary focus
on ECAAs reduced federal accountability, leaving accountability
oversight to states. The federal government would still require annual
standardized testing in grades 3-8 but would no longer use those test
scores to punish “failing” schools that do not meet adequate yearly
progress. States would be given latitude to decide how those asessment
are used to measure school and teacher performance; somewhat of a
political compromise. Less federal government for the Republicans and
less punitive consequences for the Democrats, the language and tenor
seem like a win-win. The ECAA has gained signficant support from
mainstream liberal and conservative groups, viewed as an improvement
over an outdated bill, long overdue for revision.
With the President, House, Senate, and mainstream populus all
applauding this effort, it should be recognized that ECAA is in no way a
game changer, requiring so much more in order to treat all students
equitably. We cannot forget that the ESEA was created in 1965 during
the civil rights movement. Education is seen as the great equalizer to
racial and economic diparities. It is imperative that any
reauthorization of the ESEA safeguard and uphold the equal educational
opportunity of all students without falling prey to deficit thinking
that perceives these populations as unable to learn without remediation.
In particular, those students in poverty, Native Americans, English
Language Learners, and students with disabilities, have historically
been touted as benefiting from the benevolence of supplemental funding,
with no assurance of a high quality program of instruction, or the
necessary resources required in order eliminate the opportunity gap that
still exists in contemporary society.
There are a few school funding equity issues that I feel obligated to
highlight related to any reauthorization of either the ECAA and SSA.

Pervasive underfunding of public education

The percentage of federal revenue generated to fund K-12 public
schools accounts for approximately 10% of local school budgets. Local
public schools are now more dependent upon federal revenue and local
bonds and overrides due to decreasing state and local revenue. One of
the chronic issues with the NCLB Act was that it was never fully funded.
Historically, we have tried to fund public education on the cheap. The
Congressional Budget Office projects similar funding patterns to
continue. With congress already setting limits, before discussing what
is possible, the K-12 public school system will continue to be
shortchanged. Congress needs to increase overall funding to effectively
implement programs in a comprehensive manner to support state and local
efforts.

Diverting funds away from traditional public schools

Any proposed legislation or policies must ensure that public funding
is limited to public schools, including Title I funding. Any
reauthorization should prohibit diversion of public school funds to
for-profit charter, private and religious schools. For instance, the
Title I “student portability” caveat, if left unrestricted would allow
public dollars to flow into private and/or religious schools with no
accountability to the public.
Both bills would expand funding for charter schools (including
for-profit) into one program through replication of any “high-quality”
charters. On the surface, new changes to charter school funding are
ideal, allowing parents to use their child’s funding in schools that are
“successful,” but neither bill takes a stance on the depleting affects
of funding diversion away from existing schools and districts. We need
to make sure we fully fund public schools
before we divert resources toward “innovative” charter schools. We
should focus on innovation in our traditional public schools.

Any proposed legislation must ensure funds are used to provide
services to the students they are intended to serve. The term
“flexibility,” as applied to school funding, usually means “let me do
whatever I need to do with this money,” without any accountability.
Local administrators may find this flexibility liberating but in
practice this could lead to significant unintended consequences for
underserving populations most in need. In addition, the notion of
collapsing Title I funding with other sections of ESEA (i.e., ELL,
Native American), to gain more flexibility would lead to similar
problems of potentially underserving and dually underfunding targeted
students. We need funds to not only “supplement, not supplant”
education, but should hold schools accountable to properly serve
historically underserved populations.
The long overdue reform of NCLB would be a necessary but incomplete
first step towards improving our K-12 educational system. Based on the
ECAA and SSA bills, many equity issues would remain unresolved and many
students would remain underserved. The question is how much longer can
our children wait until we achieve a truly equitable system of
education, bolstered by meaningful, transformative legislation?Further readings
Duncan, A. (2015, February 12). It’s Past Time to Move Beyond No
Child Left Behind: Addressing America’s Teachers and Principals.
Retrieved from
http://blog.ed.gov/2015/02/its-past-time-to-move-beyond-no-child-left-behind-addressing-americas-teachers-and-principals/
Jimenez-Castellanos, O. (2012). Revisiting the Coleman Report:
Deficit Ideologies and Federal Compensatory Funding in Low-Income Latino
School Communities. Association of Mexican-American Educators Journal, 6(2), 48-55.
Jimenez-Castellanos, O. (2010). Relationship Between Educational
Resources and School Achievement: A Mixed Method Intra-District
Analysis. The Urban Review, 42(4), 351-371.
Jimenez-Castellanos, O. & Okhremchouck, I. (2013). Entitlement
Funding for English Language Learners in California: An Intra-District
Case Study. Educational Considerations, 40(2), 27-33.
Jimenez-Castellanos, O., & Topper, A. (2012). The Cost of
Providing an Adequate Education to English Language Learners: A Review
of the Literature. Review of Educational Research, 82(2), 179-232.
Ravitch, D. (2015, November 15). Edweek: Deal Near to Revise NCLB. Retrieved from http://dianeravitch.net/2015/11/15/edweek-deal-near-to-revise-nclb/
U.S. Department of Education, For Each and Every Child—A Strategy for
Education Equity and Excellence, Washington, D.C., 2013. Retrieved
from https://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/eec/equity-excellence-commission-report.pdf
Walker, T. (2015, July 16). U.S. Senate Passes Every Child Achieves Act, End of NCLB Era Draws Closer. Retrieved from http://neatoday.org/2015/07/16/u-s-senate-passes-every-child-achieves-act-end-of-nclb-era-draws-closer/